Auctions conducted across the Internet have become a very popular method of selling goods and services, which can both be referred to as items. In a typical ascending price auction, once a seller has submitted a request to sell an item, the item becomes available for bidding via an item listing, with the bidding to close typically at some predetermined time (e.g., at noon, 3 days later). Potential buyers are able to view a description and possibly an image of the item, and submit one or more bids for the item via the item listing. The potential buyer that submitted the highest bid on the item at the end of the auction wins the auction and is typically contractually obligated to purchase the item for the bid amount. The highest bid buyer is notified and the transaction between the seller and the highest bid buyer is facilitated.
Online services, such as Internet-based auctions, can suffer from outages, rendering the services unavailable to their users for a period of time. In the context of an online auction, such services that may become unavailable to users include enabling users to submit a bid for an item listing. As a result, outages prevent users from using such services and prevent service providers from providing such services to their users, as well as causing other technical problems. For online auctions, when an outage occurs too close to the end time of an item listing, potential bidders can be prevented from submitting a bid for the item listing, especially when the end time is during the outage, as many potential bidders wait until the last few moments (e.g., one minute before the end time) to submit a bid. As a result, the seller of the affected item listing does not benefit from the full duration of the listing time and often loses a higher sale price due to the outage. Although sellers can contact a customer service agent to receive a credit for the lost revenue, this remedial measure does not help prevent the problem or resolve the loss of function of the online service. Furthermore, it is an imprecise and unreliable manual process. If the seller does not contact a customer service agent, then he or she is not compensated for the impact of the outage on the item listing, which can result in a bad user experience and an unjust collecting of certain service fees from the seller. Currently, there are no effective technological solutions to this technological problem of outages.
The headings provided herein are merely for convenience and do not necessarily affect the scope or meaning of the terms used.